When I was an impressionable young girl my mother was larger than life, thin as a rail and favored cigarettes to eating. She subsisted on cottage cheese, See’s candy and vodka, and she looked damn good in clothes. While her contemporaries fell victim to the vagaries of middle age weight gain, she managed to defy it.

I was never quite thin enough for her liking, and while I never developed a full-blown eating disorder (I tried bulima once in my college sorority, but my hatred for the sensation of throwing up outweighed my desire to be thin), I have managed to carry her disdain for my body along with me all these years.

I feel it in the way I look at the rear view image of myself in the mirror or loathingly down at the roll of belly fat. She left a sizeable dent in my body image that I am still trying to iron out, which sometimes seems ridiculous at my age. I say to myself, “enough already,” but the psyche is a delicate and fragile entity when we are young. A lot of impressions can get stuck in there and extricating them is bloody challenging.

Remember those yellow stick fly-traps that were strips of adhesive paper that the flies would get stuck too? I imagine the childhood energy field to be a bit like them — when a belief goes in, it tends to stick and you have to remove it, body part by body part.

The residue of the offhand comment, “It’s a shame you’ll never look skinny with that short waist of yours,” has followed me into adulthood like an unrelenting stalker I can’t escape. It pops up in the darndest of places.

As a result of this, I have always been incredibly careful about what I say to my daughter, so I don’t inadvertently imprint her self-image with a careless comment. Although I’m sure I have inflicted other parenting atrocities on her, hopefully her body image will be in tact.

I share this here because I was marveling the other day at how, even when I was down to ninety-five pounds at the full tilt of everything after my husband’s death, I saw things about my body that simply weren’t there. And then when things started settling down and I put some weight on, I lamented the fact that I could no longer fit into the jeans I did at ninety-five pounds, the ones that only a wispy teenager should be wearing.

I blame my mother for this, in the kindest of ways, since she is not here to defend herself. I think her intentions were probably well meaning, but unfortunately the take-away message I got was that I was somehow not enough and it has colored the vast majority of my life.

I am slowly finding my way to enough and I hope you are too.

With endless gratitude for you presence,

-db

Who is Dianna Bonny?

Hi, my name is Dianna Bonny. It’s my mission to candidly share my journey with you. For me, it’s all about the healing: to create a radiant healing energy for others who have befallen a similar fate. Together, we can forge beautiful lives of belonging and connection. Thanks for joining me today! I look forward to hearing from you.